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Real public servants are free enterprising individuals who, inspired, embrace challenge, take risks, and create, sometimes big, and often, they create jobs in the process, all out of their ideas, and self initiative...

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Americans are still talking about the recently deflated housing bubble, but there’s a new bubble in town. It’s the student loan bubble and when this one pops, it might dwarf the wreckage we’ve witnessed in the real-estate markets. In the latest news, the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors warned that soaring student-loan debt has “parallels to the housing crisis,”

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"If a widespread pattern of [knock-and-announce] violations were shown . . . there would be reason for grave concern."—Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in Hudson v. Michigan, June 15, 2006.An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids," by Radley Balko. What does this map mean?How to use this mapView Original Map and Database

Key

Death of an innocent.

Death or injury of a police officer.

Death of a nonviolent offender.

Raid on an innocent suspect.

Other examples of paramilitary police excess.

Unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people.

The proliferation of SWAT teams, police militarization, and the Drug War have given rise to a dramatic increase in the number of "no-knock" or "quick-knock" raids on suspected drug offenders. Because these raids are often conducted based on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants, police sometimes conduct SWAT-style raids on the wrong home, or on the homes of nonviolent, misdemeanor drug users. Such highly-volatile, overly confrontational tactics are bad enough when no one is hurt -- it's difficult to imagine the terror an innocent suspect or family faces when a SWAT team mistakenly breaks down their door in the middle of the night.But even more disturbing are the number of times such "wrong door" raids unnecessarily lead to the injury or death of suspects, bystanders, and police officers. Defenders of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics say such incidents are isolated and rare. The map above aims to refute that notion.